1. Sometimes the chimney was hot or alight. They sent us up anyway, mostly naked. At night we, sleeping black, dreamt of the bakers on Lothbury, of tight flues and endless winding. The first time Jonny went up, there was …

and where is the point at which penance comes knees bent with your name as absolution on its tongue we can only hope for something that knows, perhaps when we do not: the taste of clemency when the sentence is …

I was named after a well my sister, too after holy wells distant from each other we are distant from each other our mother didn’t intend it war is the frantic wet-nurse running between us we are both thirsty we …

She would tell me In the space between heartbeats Feel the punch from earth Coursing through feet to your fingertips Alerting you to the whisper of touch Beckoning you to listen for the precision of creation Is there peace in …

An afternoon indoors but for sunbeams flecking the audience of relatives, it could be any evening any century before ‘Nigeria’ was coined to group the villages, the hundreds of thousands of families gathered where the wind is low, the rumbling …

All this is fact / That Jebo had a knack for melodrama. That his slight weight barely marked That boarding school ground. That he was teased for his fair complexion. That he’d skim most crowds in search of me. That …

The gate-guard is at special attention positioned in highland chill new gold buttons and a collar hand-twined blanket in a dejected corner on the tables, reserve is hung and the meat devoured with the finest whiskies teasing the men teasing …

the Composer is a father of lullabies ostensible notes drank under waning light the tunes spread the hues of promise he is a herder of tongues and eardrums penning dreams while the earth generations bled for is cut up today …

I when the time came in that small world of half-woken stars and broken moonlight we were gathering palmnuts un-cracked palmkernels of previous years lying silent in the dust breeding thick and lice termites eating away detachable peelings and building …

The rebel is all shield and sword, you are all flesh and feet. Already dead in this old Europe. A road of neon dirt grows towards a checkpoint. An Acholi soldier laughs in hyena soliloquy. Blood and wine from hills …

i am afraid that everyone died & it did not fix the world this was meant to be the afterlife to the burning countries our mothers left behind girls with fathers gone or gone missing sistered to dark boys marked …